Book Reviews

150 Book Reviews le montre l’étude des dynasties lilloises du négoce étudiées par Jean-Pierre Hirsch (Les Deux Rêves du commerce [Paris : Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1992]), le partage égalitaire peut être contourné grâce aux différentes modalités du contrat de mariage à la dispositions des familles, lesquelles utilisent celles qui les arrangent de manière à conserver l’entreprise dans le lignage, quoi qu’il puisse arriver au couple et quel que soit le nombre des enfants nés du mariage. Plus près de nous, les lois et décrets facilitant les donations en France ont profondément bouleversé les transferts de ressource entre les générations, parfois au point que les dons entre vifs ont atteint en vo- lume monétaire celui de l’héritage. Plus encore, si l’on ajoute la défiscalisation des dons entre vifs à la hausse de la masse successorale qui peut être transmise sans être soumise à impôt, on a, dans la France contemporaine, une abolition de fait de l’imposition successorale pour une grande partie de la population, à l’exception des fractions les plus riches du dernier décile. On doit donc prêter attention aussi au fait que l’héritage prend place dans un complexe de dispositifs qui s’entremêlent, se chevauchent, s’appuient mutuellement les uns sur les autres, dans les pratiques effectives sinon dans les rhétoriques de légitimation. Finalement, ce travail me semble ouvrir la voie à une approche nouvelle et suggestive en matière d’étude des dispositifs de transferts de ressources. Beckert a centré sa recherche sur la comparaison d’un même dispositif mis en place dans trois pays, mais il est loisible de modifier, puis de complexifier le travail comparatif de la manière suivante. Il serait aussi intéressant de procéder à des comparaisons analytiques et historiques de différents dispositifs (héritage, assurance décès, etc.) servant à transférer les ressources causa mortis sur un seul pays de façon à voir comment ces différents dispositifs diffèrent, mais aussi s’étayent les uns les autres. Cette approche aurait l’avantage de met- tre en relief les spécificités de chaque dispositif comme la comparaison entre les pays permet de le faire à un autre niveau, tout en offrant le moyen de tenir compte des interactions entre les dispositifs. Il serait ensuite possible d’avancer sur le terrain d’une double comparaison des dispositifs retenus sur plusieurs pays. On le voit, l’ouvrage de Beckert ouvre de riches et vastes perspectives pour les recherches futures. John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) Review by Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Harvard University This book explains both why the French “don’t like headscarves,” and why the voices opposing the 2004 law forbidding pupils from wearing “ostentatious Book Reviews 151 signs of religion” in French public schools were marginalized. It is less about why Muslims in France might wear headscarves, though it does show that they do so for disparate reasons, some more religiously motivated than others. In ten succinct chapters, John Bowen gives the necessary background for understanding why a practice concerning as few as 1,500 girls nationwide has repeatedly become a flashpoint for French national identity and republican values in the past two decades. More than anything else, the media turned isolated incidents into “affairs.” Bowen shows that stories about high schools in daily newspapers preceded or followed those about rising violence in Algeria. From there, it was easy to conclude that the problems presented by political Islam and those faced in a small number of schools in France were one and the same. Dissenting views were sidelined not only in the media but even behind the closed doors of government commissions. Befitting his profession as an anthropologist, Bowen lucidly analyzes the group dynamics behind the deliberation of the “Stasi Commission,” appointed by President Chirac in 2003 to address ques- tions concerning the application of the principle of laïcité and named after its chairman, Bernard Stasi. Most extraordinary is his account of division within the commission and the enormous pressure its members were under to arrive at a unanimous conclusion in favor of a ban. Bowen is most comfortable basing his analysis on interviews and observa- tion, but he also has a deep appreciation of historical context. He reminds us that the first “scarf affair” broke in the wake of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie after publication of The Satanic Verses, followed a month later by the emergence of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria. Sub- sequent “affairs” erupted as political Islam looked poised to take root in Alge- ria and then as Algeria became embroiled in a brutal civil war. Finally, the most recent “affair”—which led to the passage of the law in 2004—cannot be divorced from the geopolitical context of terrorist attacks on the United States, the UK, and Spain. The “affairs” have their origins in the 1980s for other reasons, as well. Bowen cites the rise of the extreme Right, especially Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National party, as creating a crisis for mainstream politicians, not only on the conservative Right, but also on the Left. The growing popularity of Le Pen prompted a new sort of left-wing republicanism, one celebrating the principle of color-blind equality in opposition to Le Pen’s racism. Bowen convincingly contends that this brand of republicanism dates to the last few decades, while also explaining the longer history of laïcité upon which contemporary republican ideology draws. Indeed, French public figures, according to Bowen, “frame the discussion of nearly any important social issue in terms of its long-term history” and this tendency “leads public figures to emphasize (or invent) continuity over rupture” (5). In the case of the “scarf affair,” they assert that there has always been consensus around laïcité. As Bowen takes his readers through the history of religion-state relations in France, he exposes such claims as wishful thinking. 152 Book Reviews Before proceeding to evaluate the conflictual history of laïcité, Bowen rightly defines it as something other than secularism or the separation of church and state. He is excellent on explaining the intricacies of the distinc- tions drawn in France between “religion”—which refers to faith and belief— and “culte”—which does not translate as “cult” but roughly as institutionalized religion. The state sees itself as “hands-off” with regard to the former, but it reg- ulates the latter. Bowen also highlights how this particular understanding of “cultes” intersects with French notions of the “public.” Religion is private; cultes are not. Bowen offers many examples of conflicts around laïcité since the passage of the 1905 law on the separation of church and state in France, but perhaps the most illuminating are those dealing directly with schools. For instance, he recounts how, since the Debré Law of 1959, the French state has funded the teaching of pupils attending parochial schools, provided the schools meet cer- tain criteria. It does so because an earlier controversy regarding the place of religion in the republic had resulted in a very different solution. Although Bowen obviously did not want to stray too far from his immediate subject by exploring the Debré Law in detail, a greater examination of the debates concerning the law would have buttressed his argument regarding the conflict- laden history of laïcité. Among other things, the law proved that the Catholic lobby was very powerful in early Fifth Republic France, and those opposing subsidies in the name of laïcité lost their battle. Bowen also puts in its proper historical place the contention that “mixité”—or the public interaction of men and women as equals—is a fundamental value of the republic. Mixité has been cited as the antidote to “excessive modesty,” which in turn can be combated through a ban on headscarves. Bowen manages to find examples of such argu- ments that (at least to his American audience) border on the absurd: a teacher advocating a ban on headscarves, for instance, also noted that single-sex toi- lets in her school had to be rejected in the name of fighting against “anti- Republican politics” (211). Although Bowen is right to expose mixité and equality of the sexes as very recent additions to republican ideology, here again, he could have made the point more trenchant with some development. He includes little, for instance, on the early years of the republican school. Yet one need not look far to see evidence of its past lives: in every town, on what are now coeducational institutions, one can see “école des filles” or “école des garçons” engraved above the entryways to public schools—those same public schools that were so crucial to inculcating a republican ethos among France’s citizenry. Coeducation—introduced in the 1960s, according to Françoise Gas- pard, for purely fiscal reasons (Gaspard, “Femmes, foulard et république,” in Le foulard islamique en question [Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2004])—now has a second life through an ex-post facto justification of it as a value central to the vitality of the republic. When republican education was first instituted, how- ever, not only were girls and boys separated, but separation was justified in the name of the gender-specific roles they were expected to play as future men and Book Reviews 153 women in the republic. Indeed, the issue of headscarves would hardly have been on the table, even had there been a significant Muslim presence in main- land France at the time, since the republican school was initially aimed to educate children only up to the age of puberty.

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